Big Banks Will Vie For Your Attention With Cardless ATMs and VR

tedlistens writes In the year that bitcoin began to grow up and Apple Pay was born—and massive cyberattacks—the country's largest financial institutions want you to imagine themselves as incubators. Three of the big banks opened up innovation labs to imagine what's next in mobile banking; some are starting their own accelerators. Meanwhile, the latest research estimates that U.S. mobile payments, currently at $3.7 billion, will grow to $142 billion within five years. Now an industry not exactly known for speed is approaching 2015 with an ethos that sounds more Silicon Valley than Wall Street, touting visions of fridges that shop for you, Google Glass and Oculus Rifts, and the kind of futuristic security they hope will inspire consumers to trust them and their technology in the first place. I like that both a local book shop, and the coffeehouse nearest my house, have bitcoin kiosks.

Comments

Re:Not known for speed?

[colinwb]

"Who do you suppose were the first businesses to use computers?"

Not the banks! Actually a British chain of tea shops! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_(computer) The LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office I) was the first computer used for commercial business applications. Overseen by Oliver Standingford, Raymond Thompson of J. Lyons and Co.and and David Caminer, modelled closely on the Cambridge EDSAC. LEO I ran its first business application in 1951. In 1954 Lyons formed LEO Computers Ltd to market LEO I and its successors LEO II and LEO III to other companies. LEO Computers eventually became part of English Electric Company (EELM) and then International Computers Limited (ICL) and ultimately Fujitsu. LEO series computers were still in use until 1981.

One of the LEO III's quirkier features was a loudspeaker connected to the central processor which enabled operators to tell whether a program was looping by the distinctive sound it made.

http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/ In 1951 the LEO I computer was operational and ran the world's first regular routine office computer job.

Re: an industry not exactly known for speed

[fahrbot-bot]

Get a new bank. My transfers are available to me immediately.

It depends a lot on where you live. In America, a money transfer from one bank to another can take days to clear. In China, I am able to do it in seconds.

In reality, the transfer probably clears immediately, but American banks are only required by law to make the funds available within a specific number of days, so they hold that money - probably to their financial benefit.